Or, how a friendly enquiry elicited a long rant about how “Painted Ocean” came to be and how it found a happy home with Aurealis, Australia’s premier fantasy and science fiction magazine. “Painted Ocean” will be published in April...

I recently came across the Japanese term “Ikigai” which is a rather lovely concept with definitions ranging from “a reason to get up in the morning” to the more poetic “allowing the self’s possibilities to blossom”. It got me...

Progress! I have a story. It’s really, really short but it’s complete; a rounded sort of story that doesn’t occur to me that often. “The Stone Disciple” came out of a workshop weekend (which I will write more about in due course when I...

There was a series of Twitter posts today that recounted the story of a person, having boarded a train, sat down and started to read from her phone. Another passenger comes up, “Hey, baby…”. She doesn’t engage, just gets up and moves....

What does it really mean to ‘re-start’ a creative journey? If like me, you’ve thrown yourself into the deep end and sunk, more than once, there’s likely to be a great big question mark against trying again. After many years, I’ve finally...